In Our Time - Death in Venice

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

Death in Venice is Thomas Mann’s most famous – and infamous - novella. Published in 1912, it’s about the fall of the repressed writer Gustav von Aschenbach, when his supposedly objective appreciation of a young boy’s beauty becomes sexual obsession. It explores the link between creativity and self-destruction, and by the end Aschenbach’s humiliation is complete, dying on a deckchair in the act of ogling. Aschenbach's stalking of the boy and dreaming of pederasty can appal modern readers, even more than Mann expected. With Karolina Watroba, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Modern Languages at All Souls College, University of OxfordErica Wickerson, a Former Research Fellow at St Johns College, University of CambridgeSean Williams, Senior Lecturer in German and European Cultural History at the University of Sheffield Sean Williams' series of Radio 3's The Essay, Death in Trieste, can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001lzd4

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, Death in Venice is Thomas Mann's most famous novella. Published in 1912, it's about the fall of a repressed writer Gustav von Aschenbach

when his objective appreciation of a young boy's beauty becomes obsession. It explores the link between creativity and self-destruction, and by the end, Nashenbach's humiliation is complete, dying on a deck chair in an act of ogling. A Nashenbach's stalking of the boy can appall modern readers, even more than man expected. With me to discuss death in Venice by Thomas Mann, I currently in Orteaube,

post-doctoral research fellow in modern languages at All Souls College University of Oxford, Erica Wicerson, a former research fellow at St John's College University University of Cambridge and Sean Williams, senior lecturer in German and European cultural history at the University of Sheffield. Sean Williams, what do we need to know about Thomas Mann up to this point? Well, Thomas Mann was already known as a prose writer by the time he wrote the novella, and he began his career with novellas.

But his most famous book that he'd already written was Budenburgs from 1901. There was also a play set in Italy, and he had traveled to Italy for a few years before death in Venice. So he was already established of sorts before this novella came out. And in terms of style, he wasn't a political author before the First World War, but he was concerned about the social decay that he saw throughout Europe. He kind of represented decadence and decay in order to critique it, really. He has lots of heavy noun phrases, a kind of very academic style that's actually punctuated with a lot of irony. He's known as quite an ironic author and a highly intellectual author as well. And all of these aspects feed in to death in Venice. You talk, you pass by,

when you don't pass by, you mention his first big book, which was Budenbrook, which is a massive achievement and grew in stature and grew in the admiration of its followers in Germany and all over the world from then on. Absolutely. Based on Thomas Mann's own life history and in some ways It's a story about the north and about Lubek, and Death in Venice is a story about the journey south and Italy and the draw of the south. And Thomas Mann brought a lot of himself into his writing. But alongside Budenbrugns, he'd written a number of very powerful novellas,

including one with another Venetian scene, but also with themes that we see in Death in Venice, such as male-male desire and the role of the artist and the crisis of the artist and that kind of thing. He never uses one adjectives when four will do, does he? I mean, he's concerned with the minutiae of description to an extent that I didn't remember. I read it first when I was a teenager. I didn't remember that.

And it is fascinating. But if he's looking, if I'm looking at you, he won't leave anything on your spectacles, your hairstyle, the stripe of your shirt, the fact that your sleeves are old up, he won't leave anything until he's drawn a complete portrait. And it's fascinating. It's sometimes quite heavy, but it's fascinating

that he drives this through again and again and again. And he'll pack that all into one noun phrase. So often you'll really have to take stock at the end of the sentence and think what was that whole picture. Lots of semicolins. Absolutely. But he really does paint that very fine detail and often quite cutting, quite poignant.

There's a lot between the lines as well as lots of lines. Yes. Thank you. Erica. Eric goes, can you summarize the plan? slot of death in Venice for us, please? It's about the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, who is an ageing writer in his early 50s,

so it's a slightly offensive notion of aging. He's achieved great success, great fame, and now his health is beginning to decline. He takes a walk one day, and on his way back, he's waiting at a strangely empty tram stop. He looks across the road into a cemetery and sees an apparently exotic-looking traveller. The sight of this man prompts in him a vision of a kind of jungly morass is palpably erotic

and he reads this vision as a desire for travel. So after a false start he ends up going to Venice and there he has, on the way rather, he has a series of strange encounters. If I may just flag up one, notable one, on the ship on the way there, there's a group of young men and Ashkenbachter, his horror and disgust upon closer inspection realizes that one of the men is in fact no such thing. He's an old man who's kind of wearing wig and makeup and false teeth. And this is foreshadowing important events later on.

At the hotel when he reaches it, he sees a young Polish family. And among them, someone he views as the most beautiful person in the world, who's godlike, statuesque, astonishing young boy called Tadjo. Was he 11 or 14? There seems a bit of an issue. Well, the child he was based on was 11 at the time, 10 and 1 half 11. Man makes him 14 Visconti's casting with him as a 15-year-old So man makes him a little bit older. So the story is basically about his increasing attraction, infatuation with Tajou.

And at first he perceives this as kind of an artistic, aesthetic appreciation of effectively a work of art. But it grows into an obsession. And alongside this growing obsession, there's this growing rumour of the sickness pervading Venice. A disease has come in. Yes, in the hospital. industry is panicking. So they lie about it. They don't want the tourists to leave. And Ashembach is beginning to feel it himself. He makes a decision that he will leave. Then there's a mix-up and he feigns disappointment. And then he eventually finds out the truth that this disease is

spreading. And the most physically threatening thing he really does is he doesn't warn Tadio's family to leave themselves. And so he returns. And the final scene is him sitting on the beach in a deck chair watching Targio get beaten up by another boy, walk away across the sand, look once more over his shoulder and then Ashenbach dies. It's greatly about the gaze, isn't it, the look? He's following, he's stalking the boy with his eyes. The boy is, there's no sentence. He's mute.

He isn't mute, but he doesn't speak a word in the novella. They don't speak to each other. He is full of gazing at him. The boy occasionally glances across as this older man, and we're left to wonder what he's thinking. thinking, we're not given any indication you're thinking anything at all. In a lot of man's work, there's a very strong autobiographical aspect. How strong is that in death in Venice?

Well, the short answer would be it's very strong. It's possibly as most, arguably, as most exposing personal work, I'd say. Man himself said nothing in death in Venice was invented. None of the seemingly idiosyncratic encounters were invented from his stay with his wife, Katja, and Heinrich, the year before. but also, I mean, one notable difference is that Ashenbach's wife is dead. Mann has effectively killed off his wife. He wasn't very happily married at this point.

So Ashenbach is about 17 years older than man himself, but he has noticeably written some of the works man wanted to write, the Frederick the Great Study, the Maya novel. And I think when we're thinking about the autobiographical aspects of death in Venice, it is important to think about the historical context. So man was aware of the day. of writing basically a homosexual story. I mean, the Oscar Wilde trial in the 19th century,

turn of the century, there was a famous case of a steel merchant who committed suicide when he was outed. There was a famous case a few years before death in Venice involving an entourage with the Kaiser's court, which led to lots of suicides in a kind of homosexuals clique. It was incredibly dangerous telling this story. Man was aware of the risk of what he called the child love, the boy love aspect.

but writing an explicitly homosexual story was risky in all sorts of ways. So after publication of death and Venice, he himself said this is caricature, not confession. And he actually said that he only made Ashenbach homosexual, he mainly made him homosexual to make this fall from the abyss seem as deep as possible. Yes, thank you very much. Carolina, Ashenbach is a central character, but let's turn to the boy. Aschenbach objectifies him. He's the beauty.

Audlin, if you correct me, if I'm wrong, please do. There's no sort of talk of lust. There's no talk of sex, but there's an adoration of the beauty and reference to the Greek statues and reference to the classical idea of beauty. Yes, this talk of the idea of beauty comes in straight away, actually the first time Ashenbach sees Tadjo.

In German, he uses the word Falkomenhite, which is sort of associated with this platonic idea of beauty of sort of complete or utter. The platonic idea he takes, doesn't it? Yeah, exactly. And also there's stock of sculpture and statues straight away. At the same time, as soon as he sees Tadio, he also hears him, but as you mentioned before, he can't understand his language at all. He actually describes it as soft and melting or liqueascent.

Because the boy's talking Polish, and not to him, ever to him. Exactly, yes. So Tadjo is almost just of mute piece of mute stone, extremely beautiful, but almost unreal. Actually, Ashenbach also describes his skin as almost inhuman, more like a statue. And it's also immediately associated with Greek statues and Greek mythology, Greek culture, Homer, Plato. So he ceases to be a real boy very quickly and becomes this idea in Ashenbach's mind. But at the same time, there is a... is something very real about Tajou.

And I think that's especially his origin. So he is specifically identified as Polish. And to Ashenbach, the text really passes over it very quickly, but actually that place has a connection to Ashenbach's own story as well. So we find out that he was born in Cilicia for centuries, a borderland between the German and Slav peoples and territories. We find out that his mother was from Bohemia, so also a similar region. And in fact, the way that the text presents to us this geographic connection is that it's actually almost racially different.

The German text actually uses the word Rase, which is slightly different than the English race, but, you know, comparable. So Ashenbach actually sees Tadjo as radically different. But at the same time, he himself, deep down, shares something with this, you know, mysterious and slightly threatening origin in the east. What attracts Ashenbach, i.a. Thomas Mann, to the idea of objectivization of beauty. There's no, I can't think of the word sex is in the book. Lust is not there. The undertones are pretty strong undercurrents, the rip-corrence, but nevertheless it keeps on the idea of the ideal, doesn't it?

Yes, so this has led some critics to actually avoid the word homosexual attraction and talk about homoeroticism. So this is true. At the same time, I think to many readers already when the story came out and also to readers today, there is something deeply troubling, even if there are no explicit mentions of sex. You know, there clearly is some sort of strong attraction to Tadio's body. It is clearly this attraction...

I'm described in my new detail. Exactly, described minute detail down to his toes, you know, when he runs along the beach. And the easiness with which Ashan I mean immediately goes to this very high abstract theoretical level of ideas is very disturbing, I think, to readers, especially today. Why? Well, I think because it's somehow for him too easy to overlook, you know, that this is a very young boy. Ashenbach always, whenever he observes him in the language that filters Ashenbach's impression, isolates Tadjo from his surroundings, from his family.

Tadio seems to be somehow taken out of context, elevated. And as you said before, Aschenbach is really looking at him constantly to the point that often he is described with adjectives, you know, the one who is gazing, the one who is observing, the one who is looking. So actually it becomes really about this visual obsession which transforms Tadio into a piece of art or a thing or an object and the real boy somehow disappears. Ashenbach is quite exalted in his own opinion of himself.

How exalted is he and therefore how great is the fall? Yes, so when we meet Ashenbach in Munich at the beginning of the story, we find out that he is actually now Gustav von Ashenbach, and that's a recent development that happened around his 50th birthday. He is a universally respected writer. Passages from his works are included in German textbooks. Now, all of this is really almost uncanny to read now in hindsight because we know that really Thomas Mann himself will become that figure, you know.

But as Erica mentioned, Gustaf von Aschenbach in the story is older than Thomas Mann when he writes the story. So it's almost like Thomas Mann is somehow seeing his possible future. So he isn't very attracted, but... But Sean ends up in Venice. Why is it going to Venice? It just was the literary topos of the time, as well as being a tourist hotspot and the kind of traditional gateway to the east, if you like, or if you think of the Venetian Republic and a kind of trading centre. But it was somewhere that was seen as a city of light.

The sociologist Georg Zimmer had said by man's time, it was a place of appearance, shine, where Zine or being ceased to live. Byron had called it C-Sodom. It was a place of decadence decay in the popular imagination. Goethe had been there and written epigrams about it that were also quite sexual and homoerotic. and the homosexual poet August von Pladen

had also written some sonnets that came to Ashtenbach's mind as he approaches Venice and Platten had worried that he would catch cholera in the city. The epidemic I spoke of earlier is cholera. It's cholera, which in the understanding at the time was seen to come from the Ganges in this kind of orientalizing sense. Another thing about Venice is it's seen as the meeting point between the West and the East.

Absolutely. The Ganges is sweeping and on that side. and the Germans are coming in on the other side. Precisely, and the German tourists above all. And if we look at guidebooks from the time man was there, the Lido, where Aschenbach is staying, there were six new hotels on that beach. It was seen as the home of modernity, modcons, trams, buses, etc.

Whereas behind it on the island that now we know is sinking, there's all of the old art and antiquity and so on. So if death in Venice is also a story between the old and the new... But we're right to say he didn't go there hunting, for prayer, he went there for change. He went there for change, but a very important context and spectre, actually over this whole story that we have mentioned, has directly to do with classicism and homoeroticism, is the death of another 50-year-old, another German, also in early June, which is when Aschenbach dies,

and that's the death of the German classicist Johann Winkleman in Trieste, further up the Adriatic, but he was on his way to Rome via Venice or Ancona. And the important thing about that is Vinkleman had imagined beauty with capital B, as you said, in statues, but also in images of younger boys and prepubescent boys in the tradition of Greek pederasty. And Tadil, in this case, is 14 in order that he's also prepubescent to kind of fit that intellectual lineage. Thank you. Eric, there's a film made of the novella, and that's, appropriate because it's looking at and looking at is what Aschenbach does. He gazes. Yeah, you're right. It is an incredibly cinematic text in many ways. Aschenbach is basically a people watcher.

I mean, as you said earlier, there's very little dialogue. Well, there's no dialogue. He explains exchanges with Tartio, very little with anyone. And he goes around watching everyone. And one of the interesting techniques here, you're talking about Sean's shirt, I found interesting because he really does that with often with symbolically relevant details, the colour of red is repeated throughout from pomegranate juice to strawberries. But he also most often starts at quite a distance from people, be it across the road, across the dining hall,

and then zooms in uncomfortably close, this kind of cinematic zoom lens. And this was around the time of the advent of cinema as well, Kafka and people were playing with it as well in their texts. And of course the gaze is thematically important as well as in terms of the style of writing at the very end of the novella, I don't think we mentioned yet.

On the beach, the only witness, basically, to Ashenbach's death is an unmanned camera, a camera with no photographer there. And a notable scene, when Aschenbach first witnesses Tadio on the beach, he writes, man writes, with a kind of a geometric description of space. Everything we see is basically what's called an ephrastic image,

a kind of still image, painted through words that you've got the beach huts in one place, the sandcastles to the left, the swimmers further out. Any movement is basically on the spot. The kids playing here, the swimmer's bobbing up and down. And then Tadio disrupts the scene. He comes in from the left. Within the scene, we also have a painter painting it.

So it's very pictorial. It's also interesting in the ways that he actually does something far more than cinema could reach or could accomplish. Caroline, this is the link between Apollo and Dionysus. Can you tell the list of who they are, why they're important, and what part they play? Yes, so they are two of the best-known Greek gods, where man gets them as through Nietzsche. Man was an avid reader of Nietzsche. This is sort of how he actually learned almost everything about philosophy, including ancient philosophy.

And in Nietzsche's early work about tragedy, he really elevates those two gods to the status of like a general theory of art and life. So he associates Apollo and what he calls the Apollonian drive or the Apollonian est of principle. He associated with the tightness of form, control, and by extension art understood as the tightly controlled, you know, literary form. And then Dionysus is the opposite of that. So that's the god of chaos, the god of intoxication,

the god of music. That's very important both for Nietzsche and for man. and then for Visconti, who turns Ashenbach into a composer. And those two principles remained in conflict. One theory is that they generate the best art if they are combined. So one way of reading the novella is to think about the Apollonian and the Dionysian and how they are so entwined and how Ashenbach has caught up between the two. Clearly his natural inclination is towards this Apollonian principle of order, control.

But with his trip to Venice and with his fascination with Tadjo, suddenly those more chaotic, threatening forces erupt in his life. And those, very importantly, are also culturally in the Western European tradition associated with the East. So this is where the cholera and the Dionysian and this Polish boy. And for Thomas Mann, in Thomas Mann's logic, Poland, essentially is Asia or half Asia. That's how it functions throughout his works. Thank you, Sean Williams. Can we take that on?

and you could say that one of the things that Ashenbach daydreams are of his Socrates. One thing to say about that is that it is a novella of failure that Ashenbach is unable to balance these. He's outgrown irony or any kind of critical distance

in order to kind of reconcile this. And I think Thomas Mann implicitly suggests there has to be a change in external circumstances. And maybe from that standpoint we can see why man wasn't so opposed to the First World War in a way. But to come back to Socrates, Plato suggests that he engages in pederasty and also that he elevates beauty to the highest intellectual ideal.

Now, pederasty was an ancient practice of an older man and a younger boy, generally when the boy had come into public life but before puberty. Now, one thing that distinguishes antiquity and indeed even the 18th century to this novella in the early 20th is that puberty set on much later. So it was kind of around 18 to 20. So Thomas Mann, in some ways we could say that's why Tatel becomes so young

is partly in order to keep him prepubescent to fit into this critical tradition. And Thomas Mann is thematizing that and it's a very problematic connection, obviously, with homosexual desire and was so at the time. and the novella was received controversially at the time, not least because gay activists and writers about homosexuality

that saw these traditions as part of a homosexual contribution to culture were equally keen to distance themselves from sexual activity with minors. So it was not uncontroversial and it's not without offence. Thank you very much. Erica, can we talk about the disease, the cholera, which streeps through Venice during this war? He said that the cholera was one of the aspects that wasn't invented. I think it actually happened somewhere slightly different,

and he transposed it into his story. Although it is worth noting that throughout his works, he often intertwined desire with disease, which in some ways I think when thinking about just returning to the autobiographical aspect, bringing in homoeroticism, I think a lot of his later distancing himself from the novella was probably more public self-defense than internalised homophobia. But he certainly did have a very troubled relationship with desire

and intertwining Aschenbach's desire with this kind of wider disease spreading and then the death that is kind of inextricably linked to the two of them is significant. And I think also it really, I feel like it's our readership today, reading this post-pandemic affects how we see this story. I mean, the very idea of staying in a place that is just, you know, is filled with this incredibly contagious disease because you fancy someone. It really, maybe that's doing a man of the service, but it brings it all the more strongly home.

Just to take a step back for one second. We also, it's also right to bring it to play that man himself married, has several children, as well as everything else that was going on. He wasn't fulfilled, obviously. He wasn't happily married. He wrote to his brother Heinrich, kind of regrets about the marriage. He wrote a really unsympathetic early novella

basically based on his wife, Katia, and her brother Klaus, and his in-laws, which they weren't pleased about. I think after four children, he said, oh gosh, I don't want any more, this is already farcical that I've got so many children. But they did have a very long and basically supportive relationship. Katia knew about his interest in adolescent boys. She was aware of his infatuation with the boy in which Tadio was based and she stood by him.

So I actually always find it quite surprising that people fixate on death in Venice so much when thinking about Thomas Mann and homosexual desire because there are actually much more explicit transpositions of his desires towards men in other works that are less well known. The best example perhaps is Felix Kohl, a novel that he's been working on for decades. Actually, he started working on it before he even wrote death in Venice. only publishes it and actually only the first volume shortly before he dies. And there, there's an actually very explicit sex scene between Felix Kohl and an old female writer, which is, so Felix Kohl is this young man working in a hotel, but this

scene is actually based on a diary entry that Thomas Mann wrote about his own attraction to a waiter in a Swiss hotel. And then in the book, he sort of translates this attraction. to a heterosexual attraction, but actually his whole family knew about it. They were actually even facilitating meetings in the hotel between him and the waiter. So this is actually something that goes through his work,

and he always finds this ways of somehow making it more socially acceptable. I think it is important to read the novella against the backdrop of homosexuality in this period and man's own life, because it's a real grappling both with it and I guess with what we would call the closet, but also with what is clearly sexual desire or frustration and an attempt to legitimise that as something intellectual and this kind of slippage between art and the erotic.

And there was such a flowering of works about this theme in this era in what was called a crisis of masculinity. And in many ways, Thomas Mann's answer is an incredibly conservative one. But it is one that's very pained and is very, you know, because Ashenbach, he doesn't act on it, although, to go back to the idea of the pandemic, we can judge him morally all the more for not telling the family about the cholera.

So he does contribute to demise of others as well as himself, but in no sexual sense to see. Although he clearly makes Tateau feel uncomfortable at certain points, such as in a scene with the lift, which is totally lost on the Visconti version. That whole thematization of discomfort just falls away, way in Visconti into some kind of ogling. Well, you use the word intellectualisation,

and that's what he does with Sartreau, doesn't he? He intellectualises his view of him. Yeah, and it was an intellectual tradition, but it also was a tradition that was used as an excuse or a way to cover up certain activities that then and now were highly morally questionable, as well as consensual adult relationships as well. And it's a long-standing problem in art as to,

you know, how much do you need to suppress to be productive and how much do you kind of live out your desires to flourish? And that's, there's all these struggles that we see compressed into this novella. Yes, I think it's a really good point about the intellectualization. And what I'm also really interested in is the unequal distribution of the ho gets to intellectualize and translate these feelings and emotions into intellectual discourse. There's, for me, there's a very memorable scene when Aschenbach observes Tadja on the B, and Tadja is writing in the sand.

And that, so this is the only kind of writing that Tadja is ever allowed to engage in. And I think that's a very powerful symbol. It actually shows that even if Ashenbach is not conscious or isn't reflecting on this, the narrator and Thomas Mann, the author, is more alert to the unfairness and the moral dubiousness of this whole setup.

Writing in the sun's sense have been washed away, doesn't it? Well, exactly, yeah. One of the reasons that this novella is, so disturbing. I mean, powerful, we're still reading it, still talking about it, but so disturbing is because of this manipulated narrative perspective. And so as the novella goes on, basically the distance between the narrator and Aschenbach just dissolves increasingly. And in terms of using antiquity as a kind of legitimisation of what today we just see as a pedophilic attraction, turning it into this notion of pederasty. One thing that's really interesting and the

level of his language is this final dream sequence, which is this descent into orgiastic chaos, there is a shift from between this and the, basically, the opening dialogue it has with it in the daydream. And in the opening daydream, the narrator says he saw, Ashemov saw multiple times within a very short space. By this closing dream, I think he says he saw maybe once. And then after that is presented as fact, the narrator switches his poetic meter to, so the, I mean, the fancy word would be dactylic hexameter, this kind of boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, poetic meter, which recalls ancient Greek and Latin lyric poetry. So it again elevates it on the level of language, but also, even if we're not aware of that, what it does there is basically mimics the beating

of the heart, the beating of the drum that we're hearing in this scene. And so, Here, the narrator is basically forcing us as the reader to take on Aschenbach's feelings, his physical sense of feverish, building up pulsating feelings in the scene. Does this show as well as how much has changed since we met him in Munich? Yes, absolutely, but also to run with that idea for a moment, the final scene is also of a camera with the black sheet kind of flapping, which emphasises this perspective. And it is... the camera that would take a shot of all these tourists on the beach, but that all won the visual gaze,

but a specific moment in time in a certain way of looking at them. And in a similar way, the reader is constantly put into these different perspectives and manipulated or forced to take on this desire of Ashenbach and also at other times to be more critical of him. And so the reader is both manipulated if you like, but ends up being more critical than Ashenbach himself. And that's really important. And to go back to Carolina's earlier point,

I do think there is this kind of implicit affinity between Tadthiel and Aschenbach that Tadil can't realize yet, not least because he has bad teeth and is the kind of the small, young artist in the making. But Thomas Mann himself first talked to himself as a lyric writer in some sense in a letter when he was 14. So there are all of these kind of hints

that Tadzio might be somehow, similar to Ashenbach as well as being horribly objectified by him. You wanted you to come in. Yes, so one more detail about this camera at the end because it's such a powerful image. If you read some of the English translations, the adjective that describes the camera that you get is that it's abandoned.

But actually the German word there is Herren laws, which literally means without a master. So it does, you know, it can mean abandoned, but actually that idea of, you know, a gaze without a master, I think is important, because at this point in the story, Ashenbach clearly is not a master of his own gaze anymore. But also, I think it ties in with this idea that Erica and Sean have been raising, which is the narrative perspective, and man playing with us being completely tied to Ashenbach's way of perceiving the world.

But at the very end, when Ashenbach's own subjectivity recedes, because he dies, we actually get this glimpse of an alternative perspective, of this camera which connotes objectivity, but is without a master. Do you want to come in? Sean said that we are also invited to be critical of Aschenbach. I didn't feel that. I think I felt throughout that his sort of narcissistic interest and the narrator's sympathy with him really lasted, and that's what I found so uncomfortable.

And the Hearnlois I was thinking of unmanned, this idea of there being no man, but this is no master there. This is the only witness to his death, but then there's a respectful shock as the news of his death reaches the world later that day. I think this is a very important question of empathy and who are we invited to empathize with, through the narrative perspective.

And actually looking at the responses to the novella, also the critical reception, most people seem to think that we are invited to empathize with Ashenbach. Whereas I have to say when I read the story, my empathy is largely with Tadjof, this Polish boy who doesn't get to say anything. But I wonder one way to approach, it is to think of it as a dilemma about the distribution of empathy. Can we somehow find it

in ourselves as readers to empathize with both of these characters with Ashenbach, who is because of those social constraints around what is acceptable and what kind of sexuality is socially acceptable, he has to contort himself and go through all of this, you know, legitimization through thinking about ancient philosophy and so on. Maybe we can empathize with that, but then also be alert to those moments when actually maybe we can find a way to squeeze in some empathy for Tadjo as well. But I think this is one of the key things about irony and the limits of irony as a narrative device, right? It's so inherently ambiguous that you can end up thinking that that irony is some kind of meta-level that you can then critique Aschenbach, which is not felt by everybody.

And indeed, you know, the film version which we've discussed loses all sense of the that. So I think that is this sense of crisis that Thomas Mann is thematizing and the crisis of form as well that isn't resolved in the novella and then, you know, is left off and published in 1912 and there were things going on at that point that could suggest politically man was inspired to write in world events, but we all know what happened in 1914. So irony also has its limits in the novella. Is it a permissible question to me to ask, why do you think he wanted Aschenbach to die?

One interpretation, but that I think that the kind of the death of Winkleman, who initiated classicism in Germany, who died aged 50 in early June, who used descriptions of statues to also that became, you know, full of erotic subtext as well, that murder passed down as a kind of of homosexual myth and was very talked about at precisely the time man was writing. So I think the death fits all kinds of things, but it also fits the classic myth that was connected to the themes of classicism, Germans in Italy, homosexuality, and many others as well. Can we just switch a little here? How did you read Freud? Had man read Freud?

A man claimed that he hadn't read Freud By the time he wrote Death and Benesaw, The Magic Mountain, which is interesting because he plays a lot with psychoanalysis in that. He later in the 1920s, the late 1920s said, maybe I'd read a little bit of this and that, but given his propensity for boasting about who he was in contact with, it's unlikely he had, there's no evidence of it. What is this propensity to boasting about who is in contact with?

I mean, he liked talking about, he had an extensive correspondence with Carl Carreni, for example, a famous mythic academic and he liked engaging with other writers and thinkers at the time and using their ideas and the correspondence in his work. Then the interpretation of dreams came out in 1890, so a while before this. And of course, I think death in Venice is about dreams, the whole thing has a dream-like quality.

It's about myth, repression, desire, the body, the mind. but they were responding to a shared psychgeist so you could do a Freudian reading of death in Venice that wouldn't be completely without legitimation of it. I think if you think of it as a story that is about repression as much as it is about sort of parading intellectual knowledge, there is a bit of a game going on about the names that he mentions explicitly and those which we could all assume and read into it

that never once come up in the novel. You know, Winkleman would be a great example of that. Freud could possibly. be another. There is a, these names were in the cultural imagination at the time or people knew of them, but there isn't that philological evidence. Can I ask you, Carolina, what impact did the novella have on publication? It was a critical and commercial success. Actually, one scholar just have really looked in at the reviews very closely and estimated that 60% of the reviews were positive, 20% negative, 20% ambivalent. The positive, the positive. The positive

reviews were really taken with the style. They saw this sort of linguistic miracle of perfection that actually this idea of absolute beauty that Ashenbach sees in Tadjo actually turns into the absolute beauty of the style and the language. Sean already alluded to the fact that it was somewhat controversial. Of course, the homoerotic or homosexual theme was seen as very controversial. What I find quite interesting is that actually two of the very first review, were written by Thomas Mann's family members, so his brother Heinrich, and his wife's grandmother,

Hedwig Dome, who was also a very well-known public intellectual and writer, they were both very positive, and actually that caused some consternation and some scandal there were then angry reviews responding to this nepotism. So these are the details of reception history that we don't really think about now, but I think they highlight that when this novella comes out,

Thomas Mann is not yet the cultural icon that we know he will go on to become. So he is still establishing his reputation and in fact he's very anxious about his reputation and the way his career is going because Budenbrooks was this amazing success. But actually what we often forget is that the sales of the Budenbrooks

only really reach those astronomical proportions that we now know about after the publication of the Magic Mountain in the 1920s. So actually Thomas Mann is still establishing himself as a powerful voice. and death in Venice becomes really instrumental in that. It really is very important for his career going forward. There was Erica, there was a documentary about the Swedish boy who played at you.

Does that contribute anything? I mean, you could say we can learn from it how little that they'd learnt from the novella. I think it's a deeply disturbing documentary about a deeply disturbing film. And it perpetuates everything the novella is about. Visconti. horrendously objectified this poor kid. And, you know, just in front of him, we see it, you know, film festivals with a room full of journalist.

He's sitting there talking about him with precisely, as Carolina was saying earlier, no voice, kind of saying he's at an awkward age now. He was a lot more beautiful. This very idea that man, you know, has Ashtenbach thinking, well, at least Tadjo won't live long. Look at his teeth. You know, he's going to be preserved as this timeless beauty forever. and Visconti seems to be repeating that in a very painful and uncomfortable way.

What do you think the legacy of the novella has been? That's a big, difficult question. I like to think of it in conjunction with Thomas Mann's other works because I think the unfortunate part of its legacy is that at least in the English-speaking world, that's often the only book by Thomas Mann that people know. And in some way it is representative, but actually I think it really cemented man's reputation

in the English-speaking world as an incredibly serious, difficult, dense, intellectual writer, which he is, but he also has a wonderful lightness of touch, which comes out more in other works. In Felix Crowe, for instance. Yes, exactly, but also in the Magic Mountain. Actually, Thomas Mann conceived of the Magic Mountain as a follow-up to Death in Venice.

He thought of them initially as two novellas. The Magic Mountain was supposed to come very soon after Death in Venice. He was thinking of both of them as working through the same themes, you know, death drive and... sex drive and you have two male protagonists who go somewhere. They think they will only be there for a very short time and then things go wrong. And he was thinking of death in Venice as a tragedy or written in the tragic mode and then the Magic Mountain as a comedy.

And I think to me the most unfortunate element of the legacy of death in Venice is that this tragic mode really determined how Thomas Mann is seen in the English-speaking world, whereas I'm a big advocate for his comic side. And finally. I mean, I think the reason it's worked so well is also because from, not least from Britain, as well as from Germany, there's been a long tradition of travelling to Northern Italy and writing about it, and beyond all of the references, it can be read as some kind of moral tale too. And I think compressed into such a short text, that is why it is so longstanding.

Well, thank you all very much indeed. Thank you, Sean Williams, Carolina Matroba and Erica Wickerson. And to our studio engineer Donald MacDonald next week, Elizabeth Anscombe, 19-19 to 2001, who said to have changed the way philosophers think about morality. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. So what did you not say that you would like to have said? Well, I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about what some people call the musicality of the text,

the way you can identify repeated colours, for instance. I was just thinking about the other ways that man sets up certain occurrences or certain feelings and then returns to them later on. And as this being a much shorter, conciseer work, it's easier to identify how this works in death and venice. And it's kind of a good gateway text to other texts as well. Bournemouths and Magic Mountain play with the sort of light motif structure too. But yeah, I was just thinking how it gives a sense of cohesion, inevitability,

a sort of satisfying experience of reading the text that he has these recurrent images throughout. And it makes sense also that it was adapted and made into a musical production by Benjamin Britten, right, in 1973. And in some ways, I don't want to talk about the film again, but that works so much, better because within musical form you can kind of get at these internal conflicts of the mind, the ambiguities, arguably the changes in tone much more than through the visual sense that it's so much more fixed, especially on a screen. So I think that is significant too. Yeah, I mean, on that notes, in the daydream that prompts his desire for travel at the start, for example, the way he describes this jungle, the crouching tigers in the bamboo thicket,

later on the English clerk in the tourist office, uses almost exactly the same language. And this really reminds us that this is a text, this is a sort of musical artwork in itself, just to mix lots of metaphors there, rather than this is a kind of a sequence of events and independent voices, as it were. That sense of structure and tight structure and also inevitability, as you were saying, that also comes through if you look at the first and last word if you take the title to contain the first word it's death and that the very last word is actually also death

at least in the German syntax I haven't checked the English translations so this theme of death runs through from the first to the last word and is further developed at the beginning in those opening scenes that we actually didn't talk about as much so Munich the walk what Ashenbach sees it is a cemetery but actually what he sees first is the empty graves that are ready to sort of taking bodies, as it were. And of course, he doesn't know it yet,

but we readers actually do know it because of the title, because there's this huge spoiler in the title, that he's almost sort of eerily looking into his own future. He's looking into an empty grave. So this sense of foreboding, which is then continued again when he gets to the Mediterranean, before he even gets to Venice, the weather actually is very unpleasant,

not what you would hope to get if you go on a Mediterranean vacation. There's this sense of very oppressive quality of the air. It's actually very unpleasant this Venice that we have there. It's not this idealized Venice of culture and beauty.

Actually, all of the beauty that Ashenbach looks at is Tadjo. He doesn't go into the museums. He doesn't look at the buildings. It's actually very unpleasant Venice that he encounters there. The notion of death and the inevitability in this coffin at start of all the empty graves

also brings back the idea of myth, which we haven't talked about so much, but was incredibly important for man as his writing progressed through later decades. But as this rogue gondolier who wants to take his money and is taking him almost against his will, as he insists on continuing to rowing Ashenbach.

Aschenbach thinks, I might be coshed over the heads and he's taking me to Hades. He's got this idea that I'm going to the underworld. And of course he is. return and that's another reason that the gaze, this looking is so significant, that Tadio at the end, looks back over his shoulder in this watery scene and Ashenbach dies. This is very much... Orpheus.

Ophius, Signorides, yeah, exactly, that Ophius looks back at the last minute. And again, in this final illusion, this final image of death, he makes it a loving relationship. He suggests reciprocity, if that's the word. But just that example brings home how layered and how heavy the intertextuality of this novella is, because you've got the mythical element, but the suspicious gondolier, the slightly fraudulent gondolier, in a gondola that is like a coffin, that comes from Guter's description of Venice, but Gertes' description of Venice of the kind of coffin-like gondola was also in the German guidebooks to Venice at that time. you have this kind of meeting place of classical myth,

the German literary canon, and also those elements that had become popular by that point. And so resonated also on a popular level with those readers who read it, in my view. I'm critically in kind of having sympathy with Aschenbach, but whatever, you know, kind of read it in this, with this popular lens as much as with an intellectual one. them. So it's a very accessible text, even though it's a highly impenetrable text, because it's so scaffolded, if you like. Well, I thought that was terrific. The producer is coming in, creeping in. A cup of tea. I'll have some tea, please. I'm John Sudworth, and this is the story of my quest to ask a question. No interview, horrendous. You have no right to tell me not to ask questions.

It's one that's become embroiled in the fractious and fevered politics. of our times. It's very dangerous to stir up suspicion, rumours. It's not racist at all, no, not at all. It comes from China. But it's a question that matters. Where did COVID come from? Fever. The Hunt for COVID's Origin from BBC Radio 4. Listen and subscribe on BBC Sounds.